Living in joy

This is a picture of my parents on their 56th wedding anniversary. They are wearing matching shirts that my mother made for them, and mother has on the orchid that my father got for her to wear to church with her suit. This was my father's favorite picture. I came across it last night as I was looking through some files on my computer and it caught me up short. We had this picture sitting out for my father's memorial service.

It breaks my heart.

But this entry isn't about my sadness per se. It's about the process we all go through as we begin to realize that the world is a difficult place. When we lose our adolescent idealistic ideas about how wonderful and painfree this world is.

Last evening, Sam and my two older stepdaughters went out for an early dinner. In the course of conversation Sam mentioned that we had fallen into bed the night before around 8:30. Stepdaughter #1 rolled her eyes and shook her head with that I can't believe it! expression on her face (she does this better than anyone I've ever known). What followed was predictable as rain.
"Dad, that's really sad. I'll never do that!"
"Oh, you can say that now because you're young."
"No dad, I can't sleep before 8:00, except if I'm really tired!" (he had just told her that we were exhausted...)
"No, you wait. One day you'll do the exact same thing as we did. You'll see."
"No dad, you always say that and it's just not true. I'll never be like you."
"Oh yes you will! When you get older you'll do the same thing."
Sam took a breath and I knew what would come next: "I used to say to myself, "I'll never be like Grampa." And here I am, doing a lot of things just like he did. And you'll do things just like me, too, even though you'd rather die. You'll understand that when you get older."
She eyed him with disdain (another thing she does extremely well) and shook her head again, looking off in the distance as if to purge the image of Sam she had in her mind and escape such unpleasantness.

Watching her last night, it was clear that she still feels that she has the ultimate control over Life. That if she wills something, it happens or doesn't happen. That pain occurs from poor choices only, and since she's so responsible, this won't happen to her. That she will live forever. That painful joints and gray hair happen to others, but it will never happen to her. She is 21. She is supposed to feel this way to a large degree.
Looking at her, I wondered if I was envious of her straightforward sense of expectation of what her life would be like, or if I am merely still caught in a wave of grief from my father's death. Or perhaps after seeing so much senseless suffering and loss, I expect that pain is inevitable in life on this earth and that we can't paddle our own canoe on the course we'd always choose.

I used to have a very starry-eyed notion of how life worked. If we are good, only good will happen. This idea is an example of justice philosophy: the idea that bad things don't happen to good people. If I prayed enough and was living the way I believed that God wanted me to, that nothing bad could happen to me. I would be under the constant watchcare of angels. And I couldn't in my wildest dreams, imagine myself ever aging or getting wrinkly or gray-haired.

I remember an older pastor saying things like, "We live in a vale of sorrows." I used to nod, thinking of all those other people who had losses. I didn't really understand what he was saying. But then my dear friend Maria died tragically in Yosemite, as her husband had a massive heart attack and the car plunged down a ravine. My first love had leukemia and will probably die early because of it. One of my student's husbands died last week. He was far too young to die. A beautiful woman in her late 50s who used to accompany me when I sang, had back surgery that went terribly wrong. Now she walks with her legs flayed out and she's all hunched over. Another friend had a stroke two weeks ago and lay on her bathroom floor for a day and a half until someone found her.

If you tell a person in their 80s that so-and-so dropped dead of a heart attack, they will feel sad and be surprised. But the sense of shock an elderly person feels about these things, I believe, is less than the shock that someone 18 years old would feel about an acquaintance dying. The sadness and horror would be the same, but elderly people begin to expect people to fall ill and die. Young people generally don't live with this expectation. Though not true of all older people, we seem to be able to view life more realistically: bad things happen in this world, and it is still good to be alive.

The challenge is in living with abandoned joy while realizing that there is death and suffering all around. As a Christian, I view pain and loss as the results of sin in this world. It is inevitable here. And at Christmas in particular, when Handel's Messiah is sung, the answer to living in joy surrounded by a world full of suffering becomes apparent:

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory.
"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God!
He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:51-56